I am God! I am God!" shouted actress Shirley MacLaine in her autobiographical mini-series, Out on a Limb."

The 1987 television series was based on her best-selling book of the same name and thrust the New Age movement into the national spotlight.

Her striking declaration has been buzzing in the minds of scores of people captivated by her romantic story of spiritual enlightenment. Other best-selling autobiographies followed, each celebrating the enchantments of the New Age experience, whether it be spirit contact, reincarnation, out-of-the-body experiences, or cultivating inner strength through yoga and meditation.

Shirley MacLaine is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but one of a growing chorus of New Age converts reviving an ancient wisdom" for the modern masses. Their promise is alluring and their claim astounding: We are no mere mortals. We can create our own reality as gods and goddesses.

In the popular television series and book The Power of Myth" (1988), professor Joseph Campbell proclaimed that each of us is the incarnation of God."

We are all manifestations of the Buddha consciousness or Christ consciousness, only we don't know it," he asserted.

More Than Mere Mortals?

What is the New Age movement" promoted by Shirley MacLaine, Joseph Campbell, and others?

It is an umbrella term covering a wide variety of events, ideas, people, practices, and organizations. Those involved speak much of networking" with each other for the purposes of personal and social transformation.

The movement" is better viewed as a shift in the public mindset than as a comprehensive and tightly run society.

Nevertheless, its influence is felt everywhere from business seminars to public education to medical care to the movies.

The essence of the New Age mindset can be distilled into a few core ideas:

A New Age of peace, love, and tranquility is dawning. Our planet's present economic, ecological, political, and military crises can and must be overcome through a change in consciousness" which involves a new mindset and a new mystical experience. Some captured by the New Age vision look for a great world leader (sometimes called the Christ") to bring peace.

I am God!" cries Shirley MacLaine, as do countless others.

Drawing from the teachings of eastern mysticism and occultism, the New Age mindset sees everything as divine. All that is, is really God. All is one with God. God is not a personal and moral Being, but rather an impersonal principle, vibration or essence like the Force" of the Stars Wars" movies.

The New Age challenges us to awaken our God consciousness" through various mystical methods such as Transcendental Meditation, Silva Mind Control, yoga, self-hypnosis, visualization, or participation in consciousness-raising programs such as Lifespring or the Forum.

Everything is possible with us! Only ignorance of our divinity drags us down. As divine beings, the paranormal beckons us: ESP, telepathy, contact with spirit guides" (channeling), and out-of-the-body experiences become desirable. We are miracles waiting to happen.

Shirley MacLaine teaches that we are unlimited, we just don't know it." (We are gods who somehow forgot that we are gods...) And if we don't master the possibilities" of godhood in this life, reincarnation assures us that we will have endless other opportunities for advancement.

Joseph Campbell taught that God is beyond any notion of good and evil and that we must accept everything that happens without judgment. A prominent New Age writer, W. Brugh Joy, teaches that absolutes are a concoction of the rational mind."

This stems from the New Age belief that God is not a just and good Creator, but merely an impersonal force without moral attributes. IT just is.

The New Age vision of a world restored through tapping into the energy of the unlimited is enticing and intriguing. Are we more than mere mortals?

I had always thought that everything I believed in went along with the Bible. That they didn't contradict, you just added them all together."

Pam Wheaton's beliefs included a variety of ESP, astrology, and other New Age activities. She prided herself in her successful mind control over people. But her real accomplishment came when a presence" visited her one night and she experienced astral projection.

I felt that I was in control. I felt very powerful. And I felt I had found a further advanced religion than Christianity..."

Many New Age writers refer from time to time to portions of the Bible and to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Does New Age thought simply add on to biblical teaching, as so many suggest?

A closer look at how biblical teaching compares and contrasts to New Age thinking is in order.

A Different Kind of God

Whereas the New Age mindset* sees God as being a universal consciousness, the Bible describes God quite another way. (*point of view)

From the first to the last book of the Bible, the Supreme Spirit is shown to be the personal and living Lord of the universe. In the Old Testament, when God revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush, He declared, I am that I am." (Exodus 3:14) God speaks as a personal being.

The Bible never presents God as an impersonal abstraction such as a principle, essence, or force. God is not an it, but a Person.

The biblical God performs the acts of a personal being. A reading of the Bible will show that God creates, God hears, God speaks. God judges. God forgives. He is. He is not identified with His creation.

The apostle Paul in his letter to the Roman church highlighted the biblical view when he wrote of those who deny God: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, Who is blessed forever." (Romans 1:25)

For Paul, all was not God; but all should praise the Creator, who alone is God.

Both New Age and biblical thought present humans as important spiritual beings.

But beyond that, the New Age idea of man's unlimited potential and inherent godhood contrast dramatically with biblical teaching.

According to the Bible, humans are more like God than anything else in the universe. We are wonderfully made" (Psa.139) in His image and likeness." (Gen.1:26)

Yet the Bible also says we fall infinitely short of godhood. As creatures, we do not possess the credentials of the Creator.

This is clearly pointed out in several biblical passages that show God speaking through men. For instance, God spoke through the prophet Ezekiel to the king of Tyre:

Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God." (Ezekiel 28:2)

God pronounces His judgment on such foolish pride and asks this stubborn God-player: Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? But thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee." (v.9)

When Shirley MacLaine exclaims, I am God," she speaks in direct contradiction to the great I Am of the Bible. As He declared through His prophet Isaiah: I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like Me." (Isaiah 46:9)

Consider some other biblical teachings that contrast sharply with the New Age mindset: God is everywhere simultaneously (without being everything), but we can only be one place at any given time (if that!). God is all-powerful; we are limited by our creaturehood. God knows everything; we know only in part.

God is morally perfect; we are all quite clearly less than true to our own consciences.

Based on these biblical teachings, we certainly deserve a failing grade in divinity.

If God is holy and just, then our moral failings put us out of step with His character and purposes. The great Bible question to be answered is: Who can live up to God's perfect standard of goodness?

Those in the New Age movement highly esteem Jesus as a great teacher, master, guru, or yogi. Yet nothing in the Bible contradicts New Age thinking any greater than the Jesus of the New Testament.

Jesus did not claim to be an example of a self-realized guru, but the unique and unrepeatable revelation of a personal God.

While those involved in the New Age claim to tap into their deity (with varying degrees of success), the Bible shows that Jesus demonstrated His deity in ways never approached by any other historical figure.

He performed countless miracles over nature, over sickness, and over death itself when He raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. The deaf heard, the blind saw, the crippled leapt for joy.

He taught with an undeniable authority which either commanded respect or fueled hatred from those who could not bear truth.

He claimed to be no less than God in human form when He said He had the authority on earth to forgive sins. (Mark 2:1-12)

When He declared, Before Abraham was born, I am," (John 8:58) He used the divine title I Am" for Himself and His audience knew it.

If we take seriously what Jesus said about himself then we must consider the following:

The Problem Diagnosed

Jesus never taught that humans suffered from a lack of knowledge of their true nature as divine. Rather, He diagnosed the problem as one of ethical wrongdoing. He located the root of moral uncleanness squarely in the human heart. He said:

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man." (Mark 7:21-23)

Jesus also knew that this uncleanness was not an occasional problem but a general condition of humanity. He said, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." (John 8:34)

Those who are prone to view only severe wrongdoings as sin (such as murder and theft) should consider Jesus' standards. His rule of moral goodness was: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind," and Love thy neighbor as thyself." (Matthew 22:37,39)

Another way in which Jesus is attacked is to lump Him in with every other spiritual leader and religion known to man. This heresy, known as "universalism," has become extremely popular of late, particularly with the growth of New Age religion.

An album by Earth, Wind and Fire shows various religious symbols--Christian, mixed in with symbols for Hinduism, Buddhism and the occult. The album title spells it out, "All in All." In other words, it's all the same thing--there are many paths to God.

Musically this heresy is best illustrated by ex-Beatle George Harrison's album "Somewhere in England": "They call you Christ, Vishnu, Buddha, Jehovah, our Lord. You are Govindam, Bismillah, Creator of All."

Harrison is joined by a host of other rock artists who have expressed, in one way or another, this philosophy. With Eastern, New Age, and occult religion the preferred spiritual diet of the rock industry, you can count on almost any mention of Jesus within secular rock music being a reference to the anemic and hydra-headed Christ of Universalism.

The problem here is that no matter how nice it sounds to say that all religions lead to God, Jesus said they don't. Practically every religion tries to claim Jesus and write Him into their line-up of spiritual super-stars, but we have irrefutable evidence that Jesus totally denied that there is any other way to God except through Himself. As He said in John 14:6, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no one cometh unto the Father but by Me."

Elsewhere, He warned that in the Last Days men would try to deny His uniqueness: "For false Christs and false prophets shall arise ... to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect" (Mark 13:22).

Think about it for a second. If Universalism is true, then not only is Jesus a liar for saying it was a false and demonic doctrine, He is also the stupidest man who ever lived, because He voluntarily underwent the most excruciating and shameful death imaginable--for no reason at all!

In other words, if there are other ways to God, then Jesus didn't have to die in our place.

Ultimately, what the philosopher and writer C.S. Lewis said has logically got to be true, "Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or else He is Lord" (Mere Christianity, The Macmillan Company, 1952, C.S. Lewis, p.41). And His life, death and resurrection should prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to anyone seeking the truth that the latter is the case--Jesus is Lord, the true Messiah of God. And that's why Satan tries so hard to convince Man to the contrary.

The cross is at the heart of the Christian faith. Without the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection of Jesus (which, by the way, is one of the most logically proven events in ancient history), our faith, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "is vain and we are yet in our sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17).

As a symbol of its defeat and future obliteration, satanic religion loathes the cross and constantly seeks to discredit it. To this end, the "prince of the air" attempts to influence Man in one of two directions. The more subtle of the two, and hence the most prevalent, is to give it superficial respect while at the same time associating the cross with the very sins that nailed Jesus to it. This type of desecration is virtually rampant in rock, with crosses the most popular jewelry choice of the stars. It seems as though the more perverted the artist, the larger, the more numerous, or the more obsessive is their focus on the cross.

Artists impersonate a crucified Christ with a frequency that is astonishing. Crosses show up so often you would think that rock music was a Christian industry--until one looks at their intent, message, and lifestyle.

Scripture provides a profound insight into this obsession with mocking the cross, an insight that can be objectively used to diagnose one's spiritual condition--"the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:18a). In other words, mocking the cross is evidence that a person is spiritually dead. And it's the lord of death, Satan, who inspires this mockery through his incessant drive to pervert Man's image of God and Truth. Against this the Bible teaches, "But unto us who are saved, it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18b).

A second way that Hell goes after the cross is through outright desecration associated with satanic religion and liturgy. Desecration through destruction and the addition of demonic imagery and symbols is also well established within satanic religion. A T-shirt featuring an upside-down cross and Christ and the word "Destroy" was designed by Johnny Rotten and modeled by Mick Jagger on stage during the Rolling Stones' 1981 world tour.

As the representative of Christ on Earth, the church and things she stands for are abhorrent to satanic religion. Along this line, one rock group sings: "The only good Christian is a dead Christian."

Speaking of Christian death, the group by that name adds the church to their list of things to desecrate in the song "Stairs." They sing, "There is no city of God. Damn the name of God."

(Reuters) A suburban Michigan high school could be in for toil and trouble after it was sued for blocking a honor student from practicing her religion--witchcraft. Lincoln Park High School, located in a blue-collar community south of Detroit, was sued in U.S. District Court in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union for not allowing 17-year-old senior and witch Crystal Siefferly to wear a pentacle, a symbol important to her Wicca religion. The ALCU called the school's actions unlawful.

"(Our) great object was to get rid of Christianity, and to convert our churches into halls of science. The plan was not to make open attacks on religion ... but to establish a system of state schools, from which all religion was to be excluded ... and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children. For this purpose, a secret society was formed and the whole country was to be organized."

"What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good."

"There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

"Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday School's meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?"

"I think that the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition."

"We must ask how we can kill the God of Christianity. We need only to insure that our schools teach only secular knowledge. If we could achieve this, God would indeed be shortly due for a funeral service."

"I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of educational level--preschool, day care or a large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of Christianity ... and the new faith of humanism."

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural Being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It is up to you teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international children of the future."

By Phil Brennan

A sinister plot to create a new messiah and wipe out Christians has infiltrated everything from public schools to the White House staff, a top investigator warns.

New Age conspirators are working to establish a one-world religion and a one-world government ruled by Satan, says Texe Marrs in a new edition of his alarming book, Dark Secrets Of The New Age (Crossway Books 1987).

New Age movements, Marrs writes, follow a carefully designed plan to deceive the people of the world into accepting Satan as their political religious leader. And, once the Devil is enthroned, all Christians will be forced either to worship him or die.

"The New Age World Religion holds great appeal for modern man," Marrs wrote.

"New Age author and researcher Marilyn Ferguson, publisher of Brain-Mind Bulletin, says that New Age believers come from all levels of income and education.

"Among them she lists `schoolteachers and office workers, famous scientists, government officials and lawmakers, artists and millionaires, taxi drivers and celebrities, leaders in medicine, education, law, and psychology.'"

Ferguson claims they have infiltrated corporations, public schools, universities, and even the White House staff, according to Marrs.

Shockingly, the author cites scores of examples of New Age gurus praising Satan as mankind's real savior and attacking the divinity of Christ.

He also exposes the chilling, 13-point plan concocted by Satan to bring about a one-world, New Age religion as well as a one-world political order.

Many people are being lured into New Age movements by the current channeling craze, where people communicate with demons posing as spirit guides and preaching the false New Age gospel, Marrs warned.

"I am totally convinced that such spirits exist and increasingly are speaking to those they perceive to be ready for their Satanic message," he wrote.

Rabbi Arnold James Rudin and his wife Marcia Rudin are leaders of the "interreligious" group within the Cult Awareness Network and the American Family Foundation and frequent spokesmen for the American Jewish Committee. Marcia Rudin is head of the International Cult Education Project, a spinoff of the B'nai B'rith.

Rudin was an Air Force chaplain stationed in Korea and Japan in 1960-62. He participated in the formation of the New Religions Movement in America, along with such pioneers of LSD-induced "religious experiences," as Dr. Timothy Leary's sidekick Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Das). The New Religions Movement, centered at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, was a project which spawned numerous "religions," New Age belief systems, and helped revive "old religions," such as witchcraft and Satanism.

Herbert Rosedale, president of the American Family Foundation, is a partner in the New York law firm of Parker, Flatau, Chapin and Klimpl, chief representative of Israeli-owned Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim. Rosedale sent a letter praising Galen Kelly, to help get Kelly out of jail after his Kidnappers, Inc. arrest.

(AP) Is Niagara Falls ready for a New Age theme park? The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, and Canadian magician Doug Henning have been secretly buying up land in Ontario, near the falls. The guru and the magician have plans for a 1,400 acre, $1.5 billion park featuring magical rides, a Vedic (higher consciousness and all that) health center, a TM University and a residential development. The name: Maharishi Veda Land Canada.

SAN FRANCISCO--From the halls of the Vatican to radio stations across the Bible Belt, Christian leaders are warning their flocks to stay away from forms of mysticism, occultism and meditation that do not keep Jesus Christ at the undiluted centre of religious contemplation.

Last January, from the podium of the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Washington, televangelist Pat Robertson stood before 1,500 leaders of the Christian Right, looked into the 1990s and issued a dark prophecy.

"There is something coming from the East," said Robertson, lowering his voice to a whispery warning. "It's a modified version of Hinduism. It's called the New Age.

"It's sweeping into American businesses, the classrooms of America, infiltrating into Europe. It's even in the Soviet Union."

Several months later, from the podium of the Bankers Club atop San Francisco's Bank of America skyscraper, pollster George Gallup Jr. told a "Business of God" luncheon that church leaders should be concerned about "the pervasiveness of New Age thinking in this part of the country."

He called it "a serious threat to Christianity.

"It appeals to those who have little religious background but are looking for meaning in their lives," said Gallup, an evangelical Episcopalian and longtime pulse-taker of the American religious scene.

"Its methods--such as meditation--are fine. But its ends are the glorification of self, not God.

"Christianity and New Age cannot possibly exist side-by-side."

According to a San Francisco Chronicle poll on changing religious beliefs, however, Christianity and New Age do exist side-by-side in Northern California. In fact, they often exist side-by-side in the souls of individual believers.

Although it is considered heresy by their church, nearly three in 10 Roman Catholics believe in reincarnation while nearly a third believe in astrology.

Over-all, about 25 per cent of Bay Area residents who identify themselves as "Christian" believe in reincarnation--roughly the same as the general population.

Northern Californians are just as "religious" as other Americans, the Chronicle poll found, but they are more independent and open-minded about matters of the spirit. Nearly nine in 10 of those surveyed "believe in God or some transcendent spiritual force," but only 30 per cent "attend church or any organised spiritual service, seminar or workshop" on a weekly basis.

The Chronicle poll, a telephone survey of 600 Bay Area adults, was conducted March 16-19 by Mark Baldassare and Associates. It has a margin of error of four per cent.

Forty-two per cent of Americans surveyed in a 1988 Gallup Poll said they had attended church or synagogue within the previous week.

During Easter week the National Association of Evangelicals felt it necessary to issue a press release explaining the difference between resurrection and reincarnation.

The conservative Christian organisation blasted the New Age movement as a "shallow pop-psychology of self-indulgent self-affirmations, a synthetic blending of half-truths from a spirit World it does not understand."

Just before Christmas, the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned Catholics against practicing certain forms of yoga, Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation, saying they could lead to "moral deviations, psychic disturbances and degenerate into a cult of the body."

Evangelical publishing houses have issued a spate of books in recent years called the New Age movement everything from self-centered to Satanic.

Meanwhile, leading New Age personalities are becoming more pointed in their critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which they blast as outmoded, paternalistic religion that oppresses women and provides divine justification for ecological doom.

Professor Douglas Dean of the Newark College of Engineering is one of the first Western Scientists to personally witness stratling new experiments in ESP now being conducted by Soviet researchers.

Sent by the Enquirer to Russia for this purpose, he has just returned with news of amazing advances being made by the Russian scientists which he describes here in the first of two articles.

Prof. Dean one of the leading parapsychologists of the United States, made scientific history in 1968 when he demonstrated that telepathy can be transmitted to a person who is not even aware the transmission is taking place. As reported in the International Journal of Neuropsychology, he showed with measuring instruments that asubject'Spirit bloodvessels contracted when another person in in a room 250 yards away concentrated on a thought emotionally meaningful to the subject.

Russian ESP researchers have advanced so far that they can now make color motion pictures of the psychic "aura" (waves of energy) surrounding a person'Spirit body—which are used by medical doctors to diagnose illness!

This unprecedented feat is only one of the amazing accomplishments of the Russian ESPECIALLY scientists, now going allout to explore and harness psychic force. They can also:

• Show that plants "know" rain is coming—hours in advance.
• Demonstrate that when part of an organism is cut away, its life force remains in eerie phantom form—and they have photographed the phantom!
• Make pictures of the energy lines between people who are in telepathic communication with each other.

The plain fact is that the Soviets are years ahead of the U.S. in research on ESP.

They are as far ahead of us in psychic science as we are ahead of the underdeveloped countires in manufacturing technology.

In the fields of mind-over-matter phenomena and telepathy, they are already so far in advance of us, that we may never catch up.

I am certain the Russians will be the first to put ESP to every day practical use…

(TV, movies, video games, papers, etc.)

(Reuters) Teenagers who watched more television and music videos were more likely to start drinking alcohol, probably due to the influence of frequent media portrayals of drinking, a study said.

The Stanford University study of 2,600 ninth graders, who are usually 14 or 15 years old, found that for every extra hour per day spent watching music videos, they were 31 percent more likely to begin drinking alcohol during the following 18-month study period.

Ninth graders who watched an extra hour of regular television programming per day increased their chances of drinking by nearly 10 percent over the same time period.

By comparison, teenagers who spent more time watching videotaped movies or playing computer and video games, which the study authors said contain few or no depictions of alcohol, did not have a higher risk of alcohol use.

Previous studies have shown that alcoholic products are the most common beverages shown on television and music videos. (End of article.)

CHICAGO (Reuters) -- Based on a small survey of Spanish children, kids who watched more television were more likely to suffer injuries, perhaps because they were imitating stunts seen on TV, researchers said.

The researchers determined that children who watched more television had a greater chance of being hurt than those who did not watch TV. The study found that the risk of injury rose by 34 percent for every hour of television watched.

"Paradoxically, a child who spends more time watching television and devotes fewer hours to potentially more dangerous physical activities and games is at greater risk of experiencing events that cause physical injuries," study author Jose Uberos Fernandez wrote in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

"We believe that the depiction of a distorted reality on the television screen, which the child perceives as being real, may be of some help in explaining our findings," he wrote.

According to some estimates an average child today, upon reaching age 70, will have spent between seven and 10 years watching television. (End of article.)

The television-watching habits of a lifetime are being learnt early with babies as young as four months watching almost an hour a day, research on the viewing behavior of infants has found.

By 30 months, children are exposed to almost 90 minutes of television a day but they are discriminating viewers, preferring pre-school, children's or hosted cartoon shows to adult programs.

One of the researchers, Dr Judith Ungerer, a senior lecturer in psychology at Macquarie University, said the results showed there was a need and a market for programs aimed at a younger age group. (End of article.)